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Nyekuol, a young South Sudanese man living in the war-devastated Upper Nile region of South Sudan, spent years trying to find ways to send money to family members who had been displaced by the fighting that had begun in 2013. This was a risky endeavor. In one attempt to send money, he had sent cash on a civilian bus, a standard means due to the lack of banks and wire services in the region (and in the country as a whole). But on the way, the bus was ambushed by armed men. Two of the fleeing passengers were shot dead and the assailants took all of the luggage and money on board, including Nyekuol’s cash, before setting the bus itself on fire.
Not long after, Nyekuol discovered that a money transfer service company called Link was operating a branch (which they called a “Unity Point”) in Bentiu. They offered small fees to send money to places that were otherwise impossible to send money to, including just outside the Malakal displacement camp, where some of his family was living. Nyekuol saw the small network as a way to circumvent both the inaccessible formal banking system in the country—which had few branches in the region and otherwise catered exclusively to elites in the largest cities—as well as roads and transit systems that had been dramatically demonstrated to him to be completely unreliable. Let down by these official systems, this small-scale infrastructure granted Nyekuol a reliable alternative in the face of uncertainty.
I came to learn of Nyekuol’s story from one of Link’s founders, Simon, in 2015. This was just as Simon was first launching this small-scale, low-tech money transfer network with a number of South Sudanese colleagues. They had backgrounds in finance and NGO work, and they hailed from the regions they were aiming to serve through Link. While not the only such entity in South Sudan, Link’s mission to cater to the most disconnected people and places in South Sudan make it unique. From its inception, it has focused its efforts on sustaining Unity Points near displacement camps in the war-devastated northeastern region of South Sudan and within the most devastated towns in the region, Bentiu and Malakal. Befitting their self-understanding as a venture with social rather than wealth-accumulation aims, Simon and his partners have tended to take the proceeds they receive by charging small fees on each transaction and reinvest them into setting up Unity Points in far-flung places. They support such small Unity Points for months or weeks at a time, knowing they will need to shutter them when fighting breaks out again. Offering these transfer points for these brief periods is at the center of Link’s mission and reason for existing. While various peace deals and agreements have halted fighting at various moments in South Sudan in the past years, the situation remains tense. In a phone conversation in 2022, Simon evocatively described the uncertain conditions in the country to me by saying, “We are not at war, but we are not at peace.”
Link’s work of connecting the most disconnected people to those in more stable places is situated within a challenged economic system and discriminatory banking sector. The only banks in South Sudan operate in the largest towns and cater almost exclusively to the professional class of government workers and humanitarian aid professionals. They remain inaccessible to most South Sudanese people, particularly in places that have been continually devastated by fighting and have few, if any, banks at all. Link manages to eke out its tiny margins by having bare-bones offices and by being even more low-tech than phone-based money transfer systems like Kenya’s MPesa and MTN Mobile Money networks which allow people to carry balances, pay bills, and pick up money at any kiosk selling airtime. Link is instead run entirely through text messages and phone calls made on its staff members’ phones, with transactions recorded in notebooks. With no options of wiring or transferring money between locations, Link staff members carry cash on buses and regional flights, often at substantial risk, so that Unity Points have money on hand to give to recipients who are receiving funds from friends and family in larger towns. Link’s lean operation facilitates transactions to places where banks and financial institutions don’t exist and even in places where mobile cell coverage is poor or nonexistent.
As I have followed their work through phone conversations with Simon, Link’s other founders, and its employees, I’ve observed that Link’s efficacy stems directly from its flexibility. Its founders conceived of it to fill the gaps they saw between people’s everyday aspirations and future-oriented goals and the broader systems surrounding them, from the state’s security work to the aid sector’s bare-life-preserving aid intervention. In this sense, Link closely fits Francis Nyamnjoh’s notion of “incompleteness.” Nyamnjoh contends that people and their actions rarely fit the stable categories imposed on them. This “incompleteness” is not absence or lack, as often presumed. Instead, it points to the plasticity, possibility, and open-ness with which people define themselves and act on the world. Seeing incompleteness as openness and creativity refutes tendencies to cast people and actions as inferior when they do not fit austere, normative categorizations. While security forces, brokered ceasefires, food rations, and safe camps keep people alive, none of them offer people the means to rebuild or thrive. Link exists as an infrastructure of incompleteness through which people are able to forge futures and rebuild amidst upheaval and uncertainty in the shadow of broader events. In this way, it is much like the social infrastructures, life within gaps, and politics of the possible many anthropologists have so cogently analyzed.
Several stories of Link customers shared with me by Link staff demonstrate how its incompleteness crafts opportunity in the face of challenge. One such Link customer is Khamis, a Shilluk man who has lived in the Malakal displacement camp for years after fleeing fighting that had killed his young son. In the camp, Khamis has supplemented his UN-provided food rations by making and selling charcoal to other residents. More recently, his sister, who works for an NGO based in Maridi (a medium-sized town in southwestern South Sudan), started sending him money through Link. Since then, life in the Malakal displacement camp and others has grown more uncertain. After the signing of the 2018 peace deal, the UN withdrew security forces and transferred displacement camps to the jurisdiction of the South Sudanese government who planned to fully close them. Residents like Khamis have feared these changes. They have no means to rebuild or to relocate from the only homes they have had for years. Link’s facilitation of regular remittance from a family member with more stable employment has mitigated some of this uncertainty and given Khamis greater means to plan beyond the tumultuous present.
Both Nyekuol’s and Khamis’s stories illustrate the challenges faced by people Link has aimed to reach and the ways the network has become an element of their broader attempts to alter their situations. Link staff members told me many other stories of people forging stability through the network and of customers needing to continually shift where they were sending money as their intended recipients kept being displaced. All of these stories suggest how this infrastructure of incompleteness has offered constancy in the face of uncertainty. In their most ambitious discussions and proposals, Link’s founders speak of their Unity Points expanding financial literacy and entrepreneurship programs they have offered to young people. This feels crucial in former economic hubs like Bentiu and Malakal where people have lost the means and the will to plan and to launch small businesses as they have sheltered from violence. Link’s founders imagine their network and the programs they can run through them as pushing back against the economic stagnation bred by aid dependency and war.
Link’s ability to offer grounded, long-term solutions distinguishes it from humanitarian aid programs and development logics that remain disconnected from people’s realities. Crucial to their approach is their flexibility and incompleteness. They do not feel beholden to state-driven narratives of control and stability, nor to framings of perpetual emergency espoused by the aid community. They see in their customers’ situations something more ambivalent and open-ended, and they describe the work they do as meeting people where they are and offering them ways to seize some control in the face of uncertainty. Understanding the in-between-ness and the category-breaking nature of their venture offers a glimpse into the ways South Sudanese actively produce alternative futures through making connections, moving money, and forging normality in the face of disruption and violence. Such actions exist below and beyond the vantage of state actions and humanitarian intervention.
Centering incompleteness focuses our attention on people’s flexible reworking of conditions, their movements within and between massive systems, and their active imagining of what is and could be possible. Focusing on incompleteness also undermines oversimplistic readings of conflict-impacted places as failed or chaotic, and it reveals the limits of extant models of intervention. In places like Bentiu and Malakal, people are facing the withdrawal of aid and the pressure to relocate from closing displacement camps. They are uncertain about the ongoing reintegration of the armies that had devastated their areas and the tangible impacts of political deals. Through infrastructures of incompleteness like Link, they find paths for seizing control and the means for dreaming up alternative futures and potentialities.
Jean Hunleth and Samar Al-Bulushi are the section contributing editors for the Association for Africanist Anthropology.